The War of the Worlds (1898)
H.G. Wells (Modern Library, 2002)
205 p. First reading.

This must be one of the most famous science fiction stories ever written.  It has been said that in his first batch of novels Wells annexed the whole scope of subsequent science fiction writing: monstrous creatures, other worlds, time travel, special powers, technological dystopias — and here, in The War of the Worlds, alien invasion.  Its imagery, especially that of the Martian tripods striding across the countryside, has entered the popular imagination.

The apocalypse is an ancient literary genre, but Wells’ variation on the theme strikes a distinctively modern note.  Past ages have imagined that the end of human civilization would be accompanied by a great judgment, the triumph of justice, the vindication of the good and the destruction of the wicked.  It would have meaning, and could be seen as the ultimate culmination of human history.  All of that is gone for Wells.  He is ready to see the end as sheer destruction, just another stage in the remorseless triumph of the strong over the weak.  Our culture, religion, art, and science simply fall useless on the wayside, false or irrelevant.  A lot of things had to go wrong to make that vision possible.

To describe the confrontation between the Martians and us as a “war of the worlds” gives us too much credit.  The Martians’ enormous technological superiority — which nonetheless appears rather quaint by today’s standards — renders humanity’s defences useless.  Even if it is true that in the end the Martian invasion fails, it is not quite fair to say that they are defeated.  The means Wells uses to save humanity is certainly clever, but it comes about, as it were, by accident, and only serves as an ironic coda to the theme of history as meaningless struggle.  We are saved, but this kind of salvation is good news only in a sense.

Stylistically The War of the Worlds is the best of these early novels that I have been surveying.  The tone is that of a newspaper report: direct, taut, and unsentimental.

After finishing the novel, I listened to the 1938 “The War of the Worlds” radio broadcast made by Orson Welles.  Roughly the first half of this radio program is “staged” as a radio news program, which famously led some people to worry that an actual Martian invasion was taking place, though I am told that the scale of the reaction has been exaggerated.  (It is always so pleasant to think that people in the past were dumber than we are.)  In any case, it becomes obvious in the second half of the program that it is just a dramatization.  The program makes a fleeting reference to a “MacMillan University” in Toronto, but this venerable institution, laden with so many undoubted excellences, nonetheless lacks the particular excellence of existence.

**

Related Links:

• The War of the Worlds radio broadcast (about) (listen)
• H.G. Wells – The Time Machine
• H.G. Wells – The Island of Dr. Moreau
• H.G. Wells – The Invisible Man
• H.G. Wells – The First Men in the Moon
• John McNichol – The Tripods Attack!

For the past few weeks I have been sinking my toes deep into the soil of Americana, walking barefoot through the dustbowl with the music of the Carter Family.  It is really wonderful stuff.  Here is one of my favourites thus far — but be forewarned:  this song has been lodged in my head like a bullet all week, and the same may very well happen to you.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization
Anthony Esolen (Regnary, 2007)
340 p.  First reading.

Normally I would not bother with a book that flaunts its “politically incorrect” credentials.  It is almost certainly going to generate more heat than light.  My native reluctance was overcome in this case because of the author. Anthony Esolen is a translator, essayist, and author whom I admire.  He is robustly politically incorrect, to be sure, but in a thoughtful and eloquent way, and I thought the book would be worthwhile.

By and large, I was right.  There are a few cases in which he goes a little too far out of his way to get in a “zinger”, and the tone does occasionally tip over into stridency, but those are exceptions.  Essentially the book is an accessible but intelligent survey of Western culture, from the Greeks through to the present, in which Esolen systematically challenges received wisdom.

He admires the achievements of the Greeks and the Romans and acknowledges our debt to them.  In some circles that is already politically incorrect, especially when accompanied (as here) by the claim that Greek and Roman culture was, in various ways, superior to that found among other peoples.  Going a step further, both in historical chronology and in political incorrectness, he then argues that our debt to the Jewish people and to Jesus is at least as great as that owed to Greco-Roman civilization. This is a truth which a great many people today would rather forget. His discussion of the medieval era is perhaps a little rosier than is strictly warranted, but this is a justifiable strategy given the absurd views most people have about the period.  He challenges the common view of the Renaissance as a triumph of reason over superstition, and argues that the Enlightenment laid the groundwork for the tyrannies and violence of the last 150 years. Both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries he sees as periods of decline and decadence, characterized especially by debasement in politics, the arts, and education.  By our own day, the West has become alienated from itself, embarrassed of its origins and its history, and is consequently dying — in some quarters, literally so.  There is no joy in Esolen’s prognosis: he loves Western culture and would see it restored if possible, but he believes that this cannot happen unless we return to our roots.

As in any good story, there are villains and heroes.  Among the villains are Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Dewey; the heroes include Plato, Aquinas, Pascal, Johnson, Shakespeare, Browning, Dostoyevsky.  Esolen praises those who have honoured tradition, taught the importance of virtue, conscience, and community, defended human dignity, respected the natural law, and sought to preserve an expansive liberty for a man to shoulder his own responsibilities and to order his life, in concert with those of his neighbours, as he thinks best.  Consequently, he opposes those who seek to sever us from our traditions, who regard human beings as mere animals, who despise religion, who regard our nature as malleable and our customs as prejudices, who deny the moral law, and who would cede their rightful liberties and responsibilities to the state in exchange for security and creature comforts.  Clearly, there is a certain kind of reader who will find this very unpalatable.

For me the best part of the book was the early chapter on Israel.  It follows chapters on Greece and on Rome, and as much as I enjoy reading about Aristotle and the Stoics and Roman civic virtue, there is something missing. When we turn to the Jews, we find a world of fresh wind and fire: “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing,” said God to Abraham; “Be of good cheer: I have overcome the world,” said Jesus.  Socrates, for all his merits, never said anything like that.  Esolen does a superb job is showing how the faith of Israel brought a new thing into history, one that affected a deep change in our understanding of the human person, of the nature of political power and of nature, and of the possibilities of human life.  More than that — and here we reach a fevered pitch of political incorrectness — Esolen believes that this inheritance is the most important element of Western culture, and that only if we cease our rebellion against it will we restore our health.

I share Esolen’s love for Western civilization, and I have dedicated many hours of study to the hope that, in some real if modest way, this great inheritance will find in me a receptive heart and mind able to pass it forward to the next generation as a living thing.  I am startled to realize that, if Esolen’s thesis is correct, this love and this commitment make me politically incorrect.  Well, don’t tell anyone.

Today is (if I did not stumble in my counting) the 85th anniversary of the death of Gabriel Fauré.  Fauré’s music is not very well known today, apart from a few pieces like his (justly admired) Requiem and Cantique de Jean Racine.  I am no great expert on his music, but I do consider him to be among my favourite composers.  His music is gentle, always elegant and melodic, and drenched in beauty.  I like it very much.

Here is a short, and little known, piece for cello and piano.

Requiescat in pace.

At the Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson has written a hilarious “exposé” of Bob Dylan and his much abused, relentlessly adoring fans:

A Dylan concert is unlike any other event in the history of American show business. It is notable most for the uneasy sense among the audience that no one has the slightest idea what song they’re listening to. To an outsider, it looks like a cruel hoax, an inside joke that the joker alone is in on. Yet I’ve seen fans weep in gratitude as he garbles his most famous lines. The ovations are deafening. Forget Baby Huey: Dylan fans are the battered wives of the music industry.

This is funny stuff, and I recommend reading the whole thing.  Too bad he’s only kicking down an open door.  I consider myself a pretty devoted Dylan fan — fan enough to figure out what song I’m listening to, anyway — but I would be the first to agree that he has made some real stinkers in his day.  Dylan and the Dead, anyone?  (Dylan and the Dead?  Is there a difference?)  Knocked Out Loaded, Self-Portrait, Down in the Groove, and there are others too that stink to high heaven.  I don’t know any Dylan fans who defend those records.  Mr. Ferguson’s essay is a good example of the perils of overstatement.

Because here’s the thing: when Dylan is good, he’s really good.  When he’s good, there’s no-one better.  True enough, the chin-pulling and high-falutin’ academic talk about Dylan’s songs are faintly ridiculous, but the fact is that he is one of the few songwriters about whom  such talk is not plainly ridiculous.  Maybe “Visions of Johanna” and “Desolation Row” really are nonsense verse — I’ve been listening to them for twenty years, and I’m still not sure — but in the meantime they’ve been pretty wonderful songs, well worth talking about.

He’s had his ups and downs, but it’s a mistake to write him off.  We’ll be mining those hills for a long time.

May eternal light shine upon them, O Lord, with thy saints forever, for thou art merciful.
(Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them.)

They are present still!  We are not solitary though we seem so.  Few now alive understand or sanction us; but those multitudes in primitive time, who believed, and taught, and worshiped as we do, still live unto God, and, in their past deeds and their present voices, cry from the Altar.  They animate us by their example; they cheer us by their company; they are on our right hand and our left.  Martyrs, Confessors, and the like, high and low, who used the same Creeds, and celebrated the same Mysteries, and preached the same Gospel as we do.  And to them were joined, as ages went on, even in fallen times, nay, even now in times of division, fresh and fresh witnesses from the Church below.  In the world of spirits there is no difference of parties.

– John Henry Newman, Sermons.

At First Vespers for this great feast is sung Laetamini in Domino. Here is a gorgeous setting by Jean Richafort (c.1480-c.1550), sung by the Huelgas Ensemble.

Laetamini in Domino, et exsultate justi. Et gloriamini, omnes recti corde.

Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous: and shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart.

At Mass the Gradual is Timete Dominum.  Here is the chant, and below is a recording sung by A Sei Voci.  (You now have everything you need to sing it yourself.)

Revere the Lord, all you saints of his; for there is no want among those who fear him. Those who seek the Lord shall lack no good thing.

Happy Feast of All Saints!

In this clip, Fr. Robert Barron argues that Dylan is a “spiritual poet” whose work is saturated with the Bible and with the moral and spiritual traditions of Judaism and Christianity:

I’m not convinced by his interpretation of “Like a Rolling Stone”, but I do believe that his point is basically correct, even granting that Dylan is famously and exhaustingly mercurial.  The argument is developed in more detail in this essay by Francis Beckwith, which appeared in Bob Dylan and Philosophy.

Incidentally, I had never heard of Fr. Barron until I encountered him one morning at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  That morning he was quietly celebrating the Mass for a handful of English-speaking pilgrims, and only later did I discover that he has quite an extensive ministry and is fairly well-known.  To be honest, I still don’t know much about him, but anybody who thinks Dylan is a great singer is in my good books.

The Invisible Man: A Grotesque Romance (1897)
H.G. Wells (Modern Library, 2002)
175 p.  First reading.

Graham Greene divided his books into “novels” and “entertainments”, the latter being a little less probing than the former.  Had Wells done the same, The Invisible Man could have been fairly classified as an entertainment. It is imaginative, well written, and intelligent, but it hasn’t the weight of The Island of Dr. Moreau, or even of The Time Machine.

This doesn’t make it unenjoyable by any means.  The power of invisibility, like the power of unaided flight, is one of those things that has engaged my imagination since I was a child. It would seem that one could do all sorts of delightful things if invisible.  And perhaps one could, but Wells puts a spanner in the works of these happy fantasies: suppose you became invisible, but couldn’t make yourself visible again.  What happens then?

What happens then is that invisibility becomes a curse.  If you wanted to avoid becoming a sensation to be poked and prodded, you would have to conceal your invisibility from the world, which, if you think about it, would not be easy.  How would you eat?  How would you buy anything?  How would you get money?  You would even find it difficult to walk around outside when others don’t do you the courtesy of walking around you.  You might very well find yourself driven to crime in order to survive.  Rather than live as a fugitive, you might be tempted to use your invisibility to terrorize and dominate your neighbours.

All of these possibilities, and others, are explored in Wells’ story.  Reading it, the desire for invisibility begins to look morally suspect.  After all, what advantages are gained from invisibility?  One chiefly gains the ability to do or see things that one is not supposed to do or see.

The Invisible Man could be read together with Wells’ short story “The Country of the Blind”, which I have mentioned before.  In the short story, the hero is the only person in the community who can see; in the novel, the hero is the only person who cannot be seen.  There are some interesting resonances between the two.